Setup a Spartan URL on Your Intranet

10/30/2008 4:26 PM

Setup a Spartan URL on your intranet

Remembering an IP address may be easy for an IT administrator, but it's a difficult thing for system users to remember. To make life easier on your user community, setup a Spartan URL on your company intranet for quick easy access. There are two approaches which can be taken to setup a URL in your organization.

The easiest way to make a custom URL available to every user on your network, is to setup a custom intranet URL using your company DNS. Ask your system administrator to setup a custom URL (such as spartan.mycompany.com) in the DNS Forward Lookup Zone for your company intranet.

If DNS modifications are not an option, your local IT department can define a custom URL on each workstation within your organization by modifying the Windows "hosts" file on each computer. This file can be modified by an administrator using notepad.exe (or a similar text editor) to add a line to the file "c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts". The line in the file maps a specific IP address to a unique URL name. This line should look similar to the following:

10.0.0.1 spartan.mycompany.com

CAUTION: Make sure this URL name does not conflict with another URL within your organization (or on the World Wide Web), otherwise this URL record will override external DNS server records.